This course offers an action-oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (or GVV), an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education and in life.
GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead it starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. Through positive, real life examples, pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, GVV builds the skill, the confidence and likelihood that we will act on our values more often and more successfully. Based on research and practice, with over 1,000 pilots in educational settings and companies on all seven continents, GVV helps answer the questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”
You will come away from this course with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principles. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other learners. Through cases and stories based on recognizable workplace, classroom and life values conflicts, you will apply the GVV techniques and “re-frames”, expanding your repertoire for possible action as well as identifying and rehearsing responses that are likely to be most effective. Through this practice, you will gain greater confidence and competence in voicing and enacting your values effectively.

Reviews

ZN

This is a very good course that I could learned alot of thing for me to enhance my leadership skills. Thanks to coursera.

AC

Apr 20, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Interesting and insightful. I have taken away many tools to implement and to practice in work and life.

From the lesson

ADDRESSING CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH THE GVV APPROACH

What are some challenges and opportunities you might face in developing values-driven leadership? How might GVV address these challenges and opportunities? This final module addresses some of these challenges and opportunities of values driven leadership development within business and education contexts for managers, corporate users, faculty, and senior leaders. You'll then review some of the core lessons of GVV to apply to work and your individual lives. Finally, you'll hear again from the practitioners from week one in business, higher education, and the military in regards to their implementation process, impacts, and insights gained from using GVV in their workplaces. By the end of this module, you'll be able to create an individualized GVV Implementation Plan.

Taught By

Mary Gentile

Transcript

Increasingly, business schools and business faculty are being pressured to integrate issues around values and ethics into the traditional business curriculum. There's a lot of good reasons why it's not that effective to relegate these conversations exclusively to the ethics courses and to the purview of the ethics professors, valuable and important as those are. But nevertheless, it's really quite difficult sometimes for faculty to try and integrate these issues into the other courses, whether it's accounting, finance, marketing, operations and so on. Now I've never met a faculty member who did not want his or her students to be ethical and responsible managers when they graduated. But on the other hand, these same faculty raise a number of what I think are quite legitimate concerns, and challenges around trying to address ethics and value issues in their core curriculum. So let's take a look at some of those concerns and how GVV can help to address them. The first concern that I often hear from faculty is, I'm not a philosopher. They draw their credibility and their comfort from their sense of expertise on their particular subject matter. And it doesn't feel right to include a bit of philosophy-lite into the rest of their coursework. The nice thing about GVV is that it's post decision making. The cases are about a protagonist who's decided what he or she thinks the right thing to do is. And so we don't have to engage in a philosophical discussion of a utilitarian analysis or a deontological analysis of the challenge at hand. The second concern that I hear from faculty is, the right answer is not always clear. And of course that's true. As we've mentioned before, there are a lot of issues in business and in life where reasonable people of goodwill and intelligence can legitimately disagree. But nevertheless, there are a number of issues that are more clear-cut, where most of us, not everybody but most of us would agree that's actually over the line, that's something we should not be doing. But just because many of us agree with that does not mean it's easy to act on it when you're under a lot of pressure in an organizational setting. And so the nice thing about GVV, is that we actually focus on those more clear-cut issues. Because we want to give the students a chance to develop the scripts, and the skills, and the comfort, and the rehearsal, and the practice, the likelihood that they will act in those kinds of situations. Thirdly, we'll often hear from faculty, I don't want to pretend this is easy, that feels disingenuous, it feels dishonest to my students. Again, the nice thing about GVV is that, we don't pretend it's easy. We acknowledge, we try and be honest that these are very challenging situations sometimes. And that by simply giving you the set of rules, or teaching you how to analyze what's right, you're not necessarily then automatically prepared to handle them. Instead, GVV gives you the opportunity to script, and practice, and rehearse, and literally build the skill and the competence to do this effectively. The fourth concern we often hear from faculty is, well, I don't want to preach to my students. They don't want to preach for some very good reasons. On the one hand, it's not effective. Simply preaching to your students, or in an organization to your employees, doesn't necessarily mean they're going to change their behaviour. And secondly, we know it's not something students appreciate. It can be a recipe for bad evaluations for the faculty member. The nice thing about GVV is, again, it's not about preach and pretend. It's actually about saying look, here's a situation. The protagonist wants to do x, which is consistent with his or her values. Let's create an effective approach to doing so. It's about action, it's about practice, and it's about the GVV thought experience. We're not asking them, what would you do? We're saying, what if you wanted to do this? And then finally, faculty will say, and this is a very legitimate concern of course, my syllabus is already crowded, and I have an ethical obligation to actually teach the core concepts of my discipline. So the nice thing about GVV is that we're not taking time out for ethics. We're actually giving the students scenarios where the scripts and action plans that they will be developing need to use the vocabulary, and the analytics, and the frameworks of the discipline you're in. So if you're talking about a GVV case around earnings management and the protagonist is an internal auditor being pressured to engage in cooking the books. The faculty member is encouraging the students to use the language of accounting and the language of organizational effectiveness to create a script and action plan. An employee's not going to go to their boss and quote John Rawls, they're going to go to their boss and use the language of business. So in this way the students are literally practicing the same skills and vocabulary of the discipline where they're having the GVV conversation. Now, although GVV is being used in many ethics courses around the world, it is increasingly being used in the non-ethics courses. The accounting, the economics, the marketing, the operations and strategy courses. And so I really would encourage you to give it a try. Faculty who are using it in this way are finding that students are enjoying it. And there are actually, our faculty now who are doing research that suggests that this is having a positive impact on the student's ability to behave in a more ethical way.

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